Finding a Digital Marketing Agency in 2021

Marketing your business is one of the most dreaded topics for any business owner — especially if you don’t have the help of a digital marketing agency. It is incredibly frustrating to put in all of the effort to create a quality product or a service that your customers love only to find that reaching more customers and getting your product out there is an insurmountable challenge. This is the point in time when you (a business owner or someone at the company responsible for marketing) begin to seriously think about marketing strategies and looking for experts to help you with this. This is, however, the point when you hit an unexpected roadblock. If you try to google “digital marketing agency near me” – you will see hundreds if not thousands of results, each – a great looking agency, awesome website, lively Twitter, or Instagram feed. Urg!

How do you pick the right one from this sea of possibilities?

Here are a few things that we’ve seen people try:

• Compare agencies based on their website design
• Compare agencies based on their social media (i.e. who has the most informative Twitter account)
• Speak to as many agencies as you can and see whose expertise is best suited.
• Make a decision based on the proposed budget. For example, an agency that promises you 5 posts per week is better than an agency that will only do 2.

As you can probably tell picking a digital marketing agency this way is similar to finding a needle in a hack stack. You might get lucky or you may just waste a lot of time and money.

There is also an option of trying to find reviews of these agencies — you can find reviews for many businesses, including agencies in many different places like Google Business, Yelp, Capterra. It would appear to be an infallible way of weeding out the garden. Simply search for a digital marketing agency with the best possible reviews and voila — you got yourself a winner. There is, however, one problem with this. In the best case, reviews will only represent the best projects for any agency. In the worst case, reviewers can simply be made up or even bought. G2, for example, offers vendors to send out $10 amazon gift cards to their customers for offering them a review.

We’ve recognized the problem and are here to help solve it.

Our idea was simple. If we can gather enough data from agencies on their performance and then collect marketing requirements from the businesses — we can offer businesses precise matching with the most qualified agencies for their specific requirements and budget.

Let’s say you operate a business producing furniture and you have few marketing objectives:

• Build brand awareness across multiple digital channels.
• Create an engaging environment for your customers on social media.
• Create awesome outbound marketing so that you can quickly communicate via email or social about any new products, discounts, promotions, etc.
• Target a large Spanish-speaking customer base that you want to reach.

Agency Vista will translate this into the following marketing requirements that will be fed into our free matching algorithm :

• Time to hire: 1-2 weeks.
• Budget: $2,500-$5,000 per month
• Social channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest.
• Email marketing.
• Experience with tools: Facebook Business Manager, Google Analytics, email marketing tools (i.e. MailChimp or Active Campaign).
• Customer languages: English, Spanish.

Where Agency Vista gets detailed agency performance data.

When a digital marketing agency registers on Agency Vista they go through a number of steps when creating their profiles. You can find examples of these profiles in our marketing agency search. There are a few required steps:

• Agency must connect either their LinkedIn or Facebook company pages. This ensures that agencies are actually legitimate businesses.
• In order for an agency to claim experience, they have to add information about their past and/or current clients/projects.
• Each client that they add has to be verified by the Agency Vista team.
• Agencies must connect social media profiles that they manage for each client. This is how we know if the agency has experience managing certain types of social media profiles and if their work is actually yielding results.
• If an agency uses any tools for this client – they will also select them. This information is also verified.
• For each client/project and agency would specify things like budget, industry the client is in, languages in which they do marketing for this client, a list of different services they have provided for that client, the longevity of the project.

Now that we have all this verified data about the agency, it becomes fairly straight forward to connect your business with the best possible marketing firm. So based on your prior requirements, we can easily connect you with an agency that:

• Works within your budget.
• Has experience and success with the social networks you need.
• Has had clients in your industry.
• Is able to provide marketing services in the languages you require.
• etc

Note also that we rank agencies that we find based on all of this information. This means that agencies that manage the greater portion of their clients within your budget will be ranked higher in your search.

Save even more time.

Agency Vista will also deliver your marketing requirements to top agencies and have them respond back with proposals. This allows you to skip past the many well-crafted pitch decks and lengthy sales calls and get straight to what you’re actually looking for — scaling your business’s growth.

Allowing businesses to find marketing agencies based on specific requirements and to do so in a data-driven way instead of doing it anecdotally is extremely efficient for both the business and the agencies. The businesses find marketing agencies quickly and marketing agencies don’t get pinged about projects that they can’t help with either based on budget, industry, type of project, timeline, etc.

We are evolving.

Our matching algorithms are getting smarter. Our team is actively working on machine learning technologies to ensure that we can do more for our agencies and clients. Our goal is not only to make the initial introduction but to also assist both the business and agency along the way with proactive performance monitoring and advice.

Get Started On Agency Vista today.

If you are a business and I looking for a marketing agency to help with your marketing efforts I would recommend starting with Find Agency which will be automatically matched you with top marketing agencies or using our Agency Search where you can browse and compare thousands of marketing agencies on your own.

If you are a marketing agency, you can create a marketing agency profile. This profile is free, takes just a few minutes to set up and gives your agency access to Agency Vista ecosystem, and offers a number of benefits in the process such as our Verified Badge and top rankings in our marketing agency search.

We would love to hear from you! Ping us any time — we’re always here to help.